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The View from My Kitchen

Benvenuti! I hope you enjoy il panorama dalla mia cucina Italiana -- "the view from my Italian kitchen,"-- where I indulge my passion for Italian food and cooking. From here, I share some thoughts and ideas on food, as well as recipes and restaurant reviews, notes on travel, and a few garnishes from a lifetime in the entertainment industry.

You can help by leaving comments on posts and by becoming a follower. More than a hundred thousand people all over the world have viewed the blog and that's great. But every great leader needs followers and if I am ever to achieve my goal of becoming the next great leader of the Italian culinary world :-) I need followers! I promise, I'm not going to spam anybody. I'd just like to know who's out there and what your thoughts are on what I'm doing.

Grazie mille!

Tuesday, September 24, 2013

An Explanation of “Sell By,” “Use By,” and Other “Expiration” Dates

A recent study disclosed that a lot of people are throwing away a
lot of food because they don't understand the freshness and/or safety
labels.

My mother was one of those people. Let a product get within a day
of its “sell by,” “use by,” “freshness guaranteed by” or
whatever other date might have applied and that product was on its
way to the trash. No questions asked.

But questions need to be asked because there is no standardization
or regulation of these terms. People see “sell by” or “use by”
on a label and they automatically assume that some benevolent
government agency put it there for their health and well-being. Not
always so. “Big Brother” might be everywhere else, but so far he
and his cohorts at the FDA and the USDA are largely staying out of
the pantry and the refrigerator. The only places the Feds jump into
the labeling fray are in the areas of baby food and infant formula.
Occasionally states may regulate dairy product labels. Other than
that, it's all up to the manufacturer to decide.

Direct from the USDA website: “There is no uniform or
universally accepted system used for food dating in the United
States. Although dating of some foods is required by more than 20
states, there are areas of the country where much of the food supply
has some type of open date and other areas where almost no food is
dated.”

“Open dating” refers to an actual calendar date, as opposed to
an alphanumeric code, regarding the freshness of a given product. It
is not considered an indication of that product's safety, only of
it's quality. I once came across some potato chips in a friend's
pantry that were nearly three months “out of date.” My friends
were still eating them. I tried a couple and they were godawful.
Stale as a Borscht Belt comic's jokes. But if you were sufficiently
palate-impaired, you could safely consume them.

“Closed dating,” by the way, is a reference to the
aforementioned codes usually found on canned and boxed goods. They
don't have anything to do with safety, either. They are just packing
numbers used by the manufacturer.

So if Uncle Sam isn't behind the labeling, what do all those terms
mean and what should we do about them?

“Sell by” tells the store when to pull the product. After the
“sell by” date, the manufacturer will no longer guarantee that
the taste, texture, or overall quality of the product will be as good
as it was before that date. Is it still safe? Yep. Is it still
“good?” That's up to your taste buds to decide. And the stores
aren't really required to pull product that has exceeded the “sell
by” date, although doing so is good business practice.

“Use by” indicates pretty much the same thing, except it's
directed at the end user – you – rather than the middle man at
the grocery store. What will happen if you use a product the day
after its “use by” date? Nothing. Obviously, the older something
gets, the less palatable it becomes, but with a few exceptions that
we'll get to in a minute, you can still eat it if you've got the
stomach for it.

“Best if used by,” “best if used before,” “freshness
guaranteed until” – these are all phrases that relate to the
product's taste, texture, and quality. None of them have any bearing
on safety. If you can get those month-old muffins past your lips and
tongue and down your gullet, your stomach will take 'em.

A lot of manufacturers of commercial baked goods operate “outlet”
stores wherein the breads, cookies, pies, snack cakes, etc. that have
been pulled from regular retailers for being near or slightly past
their freshness dates are offered for sale at significant discounts.
The products are still “good,” but the quality is often a crap
shoot.

Now, the term “expiration date” is another matter. This one is
usually more serious. If you have a product that actually “expires”
on a particular date, then you need to pay attention to that date,
lest you expire a day or two later. Things that “expire” are
things that will become contaminated with bacteria or will be
otherwise unhealthy after a set time.

Not a lot of things “expire.” I just did a quick glance around
my refrigerator. My eggs and milk are “best by,” the heavy cream
and cream cheese say “sell by,” my orange juice just has a date
and a code number on it, and the packaged sliced ham says “prepare
or freeze by.” The handful of cans I examined in the pantry either
have “best by” dates or codes on them.

Here's the thing: all these dates apply to fresh, unopened
packages. Once you open them, it's a whole different ball game. Let's
say you've got some sandwich meat that, according to the package, is
“best by” October 15. And today is October 14. But you opened it
the day you bought it back on September 1. The color is a little
gray, it feels a bit slimy, and it really doesn't smell so good. But
it's okay, right? Because it hasn't “gone out of date” yet,
right? Wrong.

“Oh-oh! My milk expired yesterday. I'd better dump it.” No, it
didn't “expire.” It passed the “best by” date and it may be
on the way out, but you need to check it before you just dump it.
Give it a sniff. Does it smell okay? Give it a taste. Still
acceptable? Now, if it's got lumps in it and it smells like old sweat
socks, dump it without a second thought. But twenty-four hours or so
won't usually make a big difference if the product was fresh to begin
with and you've stored and handled it properly.

Here's a label a lot of people miss: “Refrigerate after
opening.” It's there on the ketchup and the mayonnaise and the
grape jelly and a lot of the things you'd expect it to be on. But
it's also on the chocolate syrup. It's on the Gatorade bottle, too.
Betcha missed that one. Why? Sugar! The perfect growth medium for all
kinds of unpleasant microscopic critters. “So, if I guzzle down
some Gatorade that I opened last week and it's been sitting in my car
ever since, am I gonna turn up my toes?” Probably not, but
depending on what cultures are growing in there, you might wish you
had. Just sayin'.

Basically, there are two types of food products in the grocery
store: perishable and shelf-stable. It shouldn't take a genius to
figure out what “perishable” means but you never know, so here
goes. “Perishable – adjective meaning subject to decay, ruin, or
destruction; i.e. perishable fruits and vegetables.” So if the
label on something perishable says “use by” or “best by,”
you'd probably better pay attention to it. Or at least keep a closer
eye on it than you would on something “shelf-stable” like cookies
or crackers or potato chips. A cookie that's a month past its “best
by” date may fall short of your expectations, but a similar piece
of roast beef – “subject to decay, ruin, or destruction” –
may cause you to spend a lot of time on your knees, if you know what
I mean.

So I hate to say it, but when it comes to labels, the onus is on
you. The government has no standards – a statement that can be
taken many ways – and manufacturer's standards are whatever they
want them to be. Throwing away “good” food because of an
arbitrary date is foolishly wasteful, but keeping “bad” food past
that same date in order to save a few pennies is simply foolish. Just
remember that, provided the product is properly handled on your part,
nothing is going to kill you at 12:01 a.m. on the day after it “goes
out of date.” But at the same time, that's a good point at which to
start watching and checking and testing and using common sense.

Who Am I (and Why Should You Care)?

I've been around long enough to know a little bit about a lot of things. That said, there are a couple of things I know a little bit more about; food and entertainment.

I've been cooking since I was a kid -- a very long time, indeed -- and I've spent most of my adult life in the entertainment industry.

I've been writing about one or the other of these topics since the '80s, and I have been published in numerous magazines and newspapers over the years. I also spent the better part of two decades behind a microphone as the host of my own radio talk show.

Does all of this make me an expert? Nah! But I'm certainly entitled to my opinion -- and so are you! :-)